Jake: What Men Think About Your "Number"

I'm not a numbers guy. My credit rating is good (not great), and I can figure out what everyone owes when the dinner check arrives, but I don't spend a lot of time quantifying things. Which is why it bugged me recently when a woman I've been seeing asked me about my number—and she wasn't talking about my debit card PIN. My response: "I don't know. Around 20." It's what I've been saying to partners—and to myself—for years now. The truth is, I really don't knowhow many people I've slept with. Likewise, I don't ask women how many people they've slept with. I don't care.

But apparently I'm in the minority. An informal poll of my friends revealed that men are curious. "If she has a really high number, it can become a source of tension," says Zac,* 28. "What I want out of a relationship is to feel special. How can it be a unique experience if she's done it with 25 guys before?" Others worry about the opposite end of the spectrum. "If her number is too low, I assume the sex won't be casual for her, and worry that she'll take it much more seriously than I do," says 30-year-old Vishal. Sometimes a guy wants a sense of your history to determine whether you're serious about him. "I tend to ask because of my health," says Patrick, a 24-year-old nightclub bouncer. "But also to get a sense of what she's looking for" (meaning whether she's just using him to get past the velvet rope). "I always hope that her number is lower," he adds.

Bottom line: I'm not going to lie—guys care. But *you *shouldn't. And I guarantee, if you are confident enough to be comfortable with wherever you stand, he will be too. Here's why obsessing is dumb:

Issue #1: What even counts toward your number, anyway?

Is it limited to penetration? How about her orgasm? Does oral count for half? Does anal count twice? I've had romantic, naked nights that didn't include coitus—shouldn't those count more than that time I got drunk and made a halfhearted (and half-masted) attempt before giving up and passing out? I think so.

Issue #2: How can you know if anyone's telling the truth?

I did a little research: When it comes to their number, men tend to claim six to eight partners on average, while women say they've had four. This is logically impossible—a math professor at the University of California at Berkeley even wrote a proof about it. Someone, he said, must be stretching the truth, and Jake has pinpointed the culprit: everyone. Men round to, well, whatever they think you want to hear. Women tend to shave a few off the top. (I have friends who say that whatever number a woman owns up to, you should add three; some suggest multiplying it by three.) Yes, despite the liberating leaps and bounds of the past few decades, the old double standard lives on: A woman who cops to losing count tends to be stigmatized, while the single-digit dude doesn't exactly earn fist bumps for his lack of experience. End result, everyone's cooking the books.

Issue #3: And really, there is no right answer to give him.

So what is the ideal number, anyway? There isn't one. Most of us—both men and women—understand that you can't rewrite your past. We're also aware that probing betrays insecurity and opens us up to having the question turned on us, a dangerous proposition. If your number is low, the guy you date should appreciate that you take sex, and him, seriously, and he should be flattered. If you're on the more experienced side of the spectrum, he should realize that could be to his benefit, provided you feel good about it all—and use the right protection.

And that's where the importance of your number really lies—not in the moral calculations of the man who's foolish enough to ask, but in your own heart and mind. Your number matters far less than what you think of your number. We all need to be OK with what we've done in the bedroom if we can hope to have future success there. And while you never should feel pressured to reveal how many people you've slept with if you don't want to, it's better to (even silently) be fine with your 38 partners than to feel ashamed about your three, because the latter suggests regret—and what guy wants to be your latest mistake?

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So I'm OK with answering "I don't know" to the number question. I prefer that it never come up. I'm not saying that every single sexual encounter I've had has been special or mattered to me in some larger sense. But I do like to think that each one meant something at the time. Even if it was just some small connection, it was more than a number.